Friday, December 12, 2014

On the surface,
Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is a perfectly-pleasant, hail fellow well met.
By day, the affable widower is employed as a sales associate at a hardware superstore
where he jokes with co-workers who call him “Pops.” Evenings, he retires to a
modest apartment in a working-class, Boston
community, although bouts of insomnia often have him descending to a nearby
diner to read a book into the wee hours of the morning.

The dingy joint looks a lot like the dive depicted by
Edward Hopper in the classic painting “Nighthawks.” Among the seedy haunt’s
habitués is Teri (Chloe Grace Moretz), a provocatively-dressed prostitute who
hangs out there between clients.

Robert takes a personal interest in the
troubled teen, a recent immigrant whose real name is Alina. He soon learns that
she’d rather be pursuing a musical career than sleeping with stranger after
stranger. Trouble is she’s under the thumb of Slavi (David Meunier), a sadistic
pimp who’ll stop at nothing to keep a whore in check.

A critical moment arrives the night she
arrives in the restaurant and hands Robert her new demo tape while trying to
hide a black eye. But he becomes less interested in the CD than in the whereabouts
of the creep who gave her the shiner.

What
neither Teri nor anybody else in town knows is that Robert’s a retired spy who had
cultivated the proverbial set of deadly skills over the course of his career. At
this juncture, the mild-mannered retiree reluctantly morphs into an anonymous vigilante
more than willing to dole out a bloody brand of
street justice on behalf of Teri and other vulnerable crime victims with
seemingly no recourse.

Thus unfolds The Equalizer, a riveting,
relatively-gruesome adaptation of the popular, 1980s TV-series. Directed by
Antoine Fuqua, this version is actually more reminiscent of Death Wish (1974), as
this picture’s protagonist behaves less like the television show’s British
gentleman than the brutal avenging angel portrayed on the big screen by Charles
Bronson.

Considerable credit must go to Oscar-winner
Mauro Fiore’s (Avatar) visually-captivating cinematography for capturing Boston in a way which is
somehow both stylish and haunting. Nevertheless, the eye-pleasing panoramas
simply serve as a backdrop for Denzel who is even better here than in his
Oscar-winning collaboration with Fuqua for Training Day.

Revenge as a dish best
served cold by a sleep-deprived, diner patron equalizer!

Blu-ray/DVD
Combo Pack Extras: Vengeance Mode; photo gallery; Home Mart: Taking Care of
Business One Bolt at a Time; Children of the Night; Inside the Equalizer;
Denzel Washington:A Different Kind of
Superhero; Equalizer Vision: Antoine Fuqua; and One Man Army: Training and
Fighting.

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The Sly Fox Film Reviews

KamWilliams.com

The Sly Fox Film Reviews publishes the content of film critic Kam Williams. Voted Most Outstanding Journalist of the Decade by the Disilgold Soul Literary Review in 2008, Kam Williams is a syndicated film and book critic who writes for 100+ publications around the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, Canada and the Caribbean. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Online, the NAACP Image Awards Nominating Committee and Rotten Tomatoes.

In addition to a BA in Black Studies from Cornell, he has an MA in English from Brown, an MBA from The Wharton School, and a JD from Boston University. Kam lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and son.